Key events
Mitch McConnell may be calling Donald Trump “nominee” behind closed doors, but the contest for the Republican presidential nomination is not over yet.
The former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley remains on the campaign trail, despite coming well short of victory in the New Hampshire primaries. She is planning to make another stand against Trump in her home state, which votes on 24 February, despite polls showing him in the lead there, too.
Haley, who served as Trump’s UN ambassador, is trying to change that, and rallied in North Charleston yesterday:
Here’s one view from the Biden administration on the potential death of the Ukraine/Israel/border security deal.
As the treasury department official Ashley Schapitl points out, Democrats indeed worked with the GOP and Donald Trump in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out to pass the Cares Act – a huge emergency package that made the economic collapse caused by the virus less severe:
Democrats could have taken this view in March 2020 (no helping the country in an election year), but instead approved a COVID aid package that was many, many times more generous than Republicans would have approved had the shoe been on the other foot. https://t.co/YC8yepKm3l
— Ashley Schapitl (@AshleySchapitl) January 25, 2024
Schapitl’s argument is that Republicans would not be returning the favor, if they honor Trump’s reported wish not to act on a potential compromise on immigration policy.
Despite his comments in private to Republican senators yesterday, Bloomberg News reports that Mitch McConnell, who never talks to reporters in the Capitol hallways, told a reporter in a Capitol hallway that talks on the immigration deal were “ongoing”:
*MCCONNELL SAYS TALKS ARE STILL ONGOING ON BORDER DEAL (to me in hall )
— Erik Wasson (@elwasson) January 25, 2024
Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s Democratic leader, meanwhile said nothing:
SCHUMER no comment to me on whether Trump has killed the border talks
— Erik Wasson (@elwasson) January 25, 2024
One of the biggest surprise players in the apparent downfall of America’s military assistance to Ukraine is Mitch McConnell.
The Republican Senate minority leader and Donald Trump do not get along, for a variety of reasons. Unlike Trump, McConnell has been a steadfast supporter of arming Kyiv, and yet, he yesterday told Republicans behind closed doors that assisting a nation considered crucial to the US’s national security priorities would have to wait.
“When we started this, the border united us and Ukraine divided us,” Punchbowl News reports McConnell said. “The politics on this have changed.”
The change is, of course, Trump’s emergence as the likely GOP nominee after winning the New Hampshire primaries on Tuesday – McConnell even called him “nominee” in the meeting.
Trump wants to make cracking down on migrants a key plank of his election campaign, and McConnell said he was willing to go along with Trump’s wishes and scupper a deal under negotiation to tighten immigration policy.
“We’re in a quandary,” McConnell said, in something of an understatement.
How Congress managed to deadlock over Israel, Ukraine aid and border policy – simultaneously
Congress has been a place of legislative trench warfare for much of the past decade-plus, but the quandary lawmakers are in right now over aid to both Ukraine and Israel and border policy is unique for the sheer variety of issues at hand.
It all started in the aftermath of Hamas’s 7 October terrorist attack, when Joe Biden rushed over to Israel, then came back to the White House and made an Oval Office address pleading for Congress to approve assistance to Ukraine and Israel’s militaries, as well as some funds for Taiwan and to bolster border security.
But in Congress, a growing faction of Republicans had turned against further aiding Kyiv’s defense against the Russian invasion. Biden’s request nonetheless presented an opportunity to get the Democrats to bend on an issue more or less completely separate from the military aid request: immigration policy. Rates of migrants entering the United States from Mexico have surged under Biden, which Republicans have pounced on to argue his administration is failing to protect the country.
While not everyone in the GOP was behind the effort, a group of Republican and Democratic senators began negotiating over tightening US immigration policy – a topic Congress hasn’t been able to find agreement on for two decades, at least. The idea was that, if Democrats would sign on to policies that may turn out not to be that different from what Donald Trump approved while in office, the Republicans would vote to approve aid to Ukraine.
Right from the start, there were plenty of reasons to think the deal wouldn’t come together, and with Republican senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s reported comments yesterday that he won’t support the deal so Trump can run on curbing immigration, it appears the naysayers were right all along.
Seeing Trump as presumptive nominee, Republicans reportedly turning against deal to help Ukraine and Israel
Good morning, US politics blog readers. The fallout from Donald Trump’s win in the New Hampshire primary has reached the US Capitol, where reports have emerged that the top Senate Republican is ready to walk away from a deal to send military assistance to Ukraine and Israel. The reason? Republicans now believe Trump has a lock on the party’s presidential nomination, and, on the campaign trail, the former president wants to be able to accuse Joe Biden of failing to stop a surge of migrants crossing the southern border. The agreement under discussion in Congress would have changed immigration policy to discourage migrants, while also unlocking GOP support for military assistance to Israel and Ukraine, a country whose cause the party’s far right has turned against.
It was a delicate bargain with global implications that senators had been hammering out for months, and it all now appears to be falling apart because of Trump. “We don’t want to do anything to undermine him,” top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell said of the former president in a behind-closed-doors meeting with his colleagues, which Punchbowl News first reported. The deal isn’t quite dead yet, but if it indeed unravels, it’s unclear what it will mean for Ukraine’s beleaguered defense against Russia, or Joe Biden’s controversial effort to arm Israel.
Here’s what else is going on today:
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Peter Navarro, a former Trump White House aide who was convicted of contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena from the January 6 committee, will be sentenced in federal court.
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Biden is heading to Wisconsin, a state he really needs to win in November, to announce $5bn in transportation investments from the 2021 infrastructure overhaul he championed.
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Trump may or may not testify today, when the trial of author E Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit resumes against him in New York City.
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